hpr1754 :: D7? Why Seven?
I explain what 7th chords are and when to use them.
Hosted by Jon Kulp on Thursday, 2015-04-23 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
chords, music theory, music, harmony.
5.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr1754
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Duration: 00:13:52
general.
In this episode I respond to one of the community-requested topics ("Music Theory") and try to explain what seventh chords are and why they are used. Below are some of the terms that I use in the course of the discussion.
- Interval: The distance between two pitches (sounded either consecutively or simultaneously)
- Consonance: Relatively stable sound between two or more pitches
- Dissonance: Relatively unstable sound between two or more pitches. Dissonance often needs a "resolution" to consonance
- Chord: three or more notes sounded together
- Chord progression: a succession of chords
- Triad: a chord with 3 pitches, the adjacent pitches separated by the interval of the 3rd.
- Seventh chord: a chord with 4 pitches, the adjacent pitches separated by the interval of the 3rd.
- Tonality: harmonic system that governs the use of major and minor keys
- Tonic: the central tone of a piece of music
- Mode: major or minor [e.g. Symphony no. 5 in C minor]
- Modulation: the process of changing keys within a piece of music
- Scale: Ascending or descending series of notes that define a key or tonality, with a specific arrangements of half-steps and whole-steps. Major and Minor scales are most common in Western music
Free public-domain music reference book: Music Notation and Terminology by Karl Wilson Gehrkens: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19499 (see ch. 18)
Free Online Music Dictionary: https://dictionary.onmusic.org/